The invention relates to a novel device intended to allow the measuring of profiles, indented or in relief, on a plane surface of a paper or board material.
More specifically, the invention provides a device capable of measuring and determining the characteristics of a crease within a sheet of paper or board.
Although more particularly described together with a device for measuring the characteristics of the crease in a sheet of paper or board, the invention shall not be limited to this application alone, and any device capable of allowing measurement of a indented or relief profile with respect to a plane surface of a paper or board material is covered by the scope of the present invention.
Specifically, the crease is constituted by the residual deformation of a sheet of board or paper under the action of a scoring tool consisting of a die, termed the counterpiece, and of a punch, termed the scoring rule, of matching shape. The scoring of the sheets of board or paper is intended to allow the folding of said sheets with a view to making, in particular, packages. This technique is nowadays widely known, so that there is no need to describe it in further detail here.
Although widely known and used, this technique has a few flaws in its application. In fact, users thereof desire to be able to have a unit or device capable of allowing inspection of the quality and uniformity of the crease obtained, so as precisely either to correct the action of the scoring tools used, or to discard the sheets of board with improper creases or incorrect characteristics, precisely so as to ease the subsequent folding or even gluing operation.
However, currently, the controller of the machine at which the scoring tools are molted, controls his machine by, as sole quality reference, visual assessment of the crease.
Given the dimensions of the latter, namely typically a width of between 700 .mu.m and 2 millimeters and a height of between 10 .mu.m and 200 .mu.m, the relative nature of such an assessment is appreciated, so that this visual inspection is not satisfactory nowadays.